6 ms·

Your content is distracting users from ads

197 points by paolomaffei 16y ago

cached version (thanks to deusexmachina): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://fi.am/entry/your-content-is-distracting-your-users-from-the-ad/&cad=h

auxbuss 16y ago
Server error.
- DeusExMachina 16y ago
  Probably the server is overloaded. Here is the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://fi.am/entry/your-content-is-distracting-your-users-from-the-ad/&cad=h http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cac...
- albertogh 16y ago
  Sorry about that. It should work fine (but a bit slowly) now. I had to stop all the other services on that machine to keep up with the traffic. My blog is in a virtual machine inside a low powered HTPC and this link is #1 here on HN and top10 in reddit frontpage so I'm getting a lot of hits.
  - dasil003 16y ago
    Nope, down again. Varnish that bad boy!
- jarin 16y ago
  Server errors also distract from ads.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Unless your server-error page has ads on it. Hmm...
Groxx 16y ago
Nah, I uninstall crashy apps. And I, for one, never plan on buying anything they produce: how can you not notice 10 days of your application failing to work, and only notice because you checked ad revenue? Sorta implies where their focus is, neh? edit: Maybe this is part of the reason. Ratings from the iStore for the application in question: *****: 0 **** : 0 *** : 1 ** : 5 * : 9 Several other applications have similarly-weighted ratings, reports of crashing, etc, though a couple are higher. Color me disinterested.
- pyre 16y ago
  > how can you not notice 10 days of your application failing > to work, and only notice because you checked ad revenue Sounds like the cronjob is broken if he wasn't being spammed due to import errors...
- albertogh 16y ago
  App developer here. Is an application which turns in a small profit, so I don't look too much at it. On the other hand, Postfix wasn't running on that machine (I had been doing some testing three weeks ago and forgot to enable it again), so the emails generated by the cronjobs didn't get forwarded to my main email account.
  - Groxx 16y ago
    I can see that, truly. And I do find the results interesting, though not really unexpected, if only because of the sheer number of people who clicked the ad(s). May I recommend something to mitigate this sort of thing in the future? Set up a script to launch an emulator for each of your apps which rely on others' services, unit test their core functionality, and save a screenshot of the key screens. Run it when you feel like it, come back in a few minutes, and peek at the pictures / pass / fail. Though, that said, I have not used the iPhone emulator. Can it be easily (enough) scripted to do something like that? I would certainly hope so, but I've been disappointed in development tools before.
- albertogh 16y ago
  Forgot to add something about those reviews. I guess you looked at the reviews for US App Store which (definitely, those aren't from Spain - there 800 review scores for this app in there), obviously, are going to be terrible for an app which doesn't show information about gas stations in the US.
jacquesm 16y ago
This is why there are many websites that split their 20 paragraph articles over 10 pages, the lower the actual content on a page the bigger the chance of a click on an ad, and the bigger the total ad inventory. Conversely, if your content is too compelling nobody will ever click on an ad.
- acangiano 16y ago
  > This is why there are many websites that split their 20 paragraph articles over 10 pages For this reason and because some of them are paid on a CPM basis, so the more pageviews the merrier.
- hoop 16y ago
  I always assumed this was for usability purposes. In particular, the whole "most users won't scroll down to see 'below the fold'" rule.
  - tjpick 16y ago
    Users do scroll. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html From the article: Scrolling beats paging because it's easier for users to simply keep going down the page than it is to decide whether or not to click through for the next page
    - hoop 16y ago
      I haven't seen this before, thanks!
  - code_duck 16y ago
    I find 'all on one page' far more usable than having to click 'next' and wait for a whole new page to load. Many comments I see generally indicate that this feeling is common.
- Groxx 16y ago
  Which is when I like to see referral links for Amazon / etc. I'll happily buy something I was already going to buy, and get them some money as well. I'd be willing to bet that the amount of use of those is directly proportional to how compelling / quality the content is. edit: though I have no clue how successful they are / have been. Anyone know what a relatively-popular blog makes from them?
owyn 16y ago
A former employer (and this is one of the many reasons I don't work there any more) was well aware of this and took advantage of it all the time. Just to give one example, their 404 error was a page of ads...
patio11 16y ago
Demand Media (and other ad-focused sites, but most remarkably their operation) understand this deep in their bones, which is why their content is to writing what chicken McNuggets are to chicken.
- RBr 16y ago
  I had a number of conversations about this exact sentiment when I was writing for Mahalo. I came to understand that there is a balance between writing enough information that users found an article helpful but not so much information that they would not want to click on ads or related pages. The problem of course is that when one is encouraged to write almost completely with profit and clicks in mind that eventually, their body of work becomes devalued by the audience.
- vaksel 16y ago
  yeah those guys are scum Search for "recover notepad files" and the first Google result is "How to Recover an Unsaved Notepad File | eHow.com " and then the whole article is about how you can't recover the file...with 4 adsense links at the end with most having click worthy titles like "recover deleted files" so Google users get screwed, Google advertisers get screwed, and eHow and Google both make a few extra bucks. I'd bet that all these content farms would have been long banned by Google, if they weren't using adsense.
  - patio11 16y ago
    To be fair, I'm very happy with the performance of my ads on their pages. (For better or worse, they rank well for e.g. "How to make a bingo card" and my ads on that page have 400% ROI.) I don't think users get anything by seeing their site before my landing page, though (aside from "frustrated").
    - vaksel 16y ago
      well you already outrank them, so maybe you are paying them to get the customers you already got. how much are you spending per click there?
protomyth 16y ago
It could also be that the user thought, since there was no content but the ad, that the app had switched to one of those "click the ad before seeing the story" type things and clicked the only thing available to get the working data. Also, what kind of programmer doesn't have checks in data acquisition code to make sure it is valid and immediately alert someone when it is not?!?
justinchen 16y ago
This concept works great for custom 500 and 404 pages. Put an Adsense for Search box and make money when you're not able to serve something else.
code_duck 16y ago
That's the click through ratio, but what about the click counts?
Tichy 16y ago
Isn't that just the same as all the spammy grabbed domains? Get a good domain name, put ads on it. I've heard some people make good money with such sites.
lhnz 16y ago
Those people will leave in anger. Why would they ever use his service again?
lwhi 16y ago
I think this phenomenon is mainly about UX and IxD. If there's only one route presented to the user .. many of the users are likely to choose the single route presented to them. Perhaps this is a trite point, but I'd argue that it's a good example of how presentation of advertising should be included as a key part of any UX and IxD strategy.
chr15 16y ago
This reminds of a problem that many publishers have with Facebook's ad platform. Users are too engaged with the content to click on the ads.

197 points by paolomaffei 16y ago

cached version (thanks to deusexmachina): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://fi.am/entry/your-content-is-distracting-your-users-from-the-ad/&cad=h

auxbuss 16y ago

Server error.

DeusExMachina 16y ago
Probably the server is overloaded. Here is the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://fi.am/entry/your-content-is-distracting-your-users-from-the-ad/&cad=h http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cac...
albertogh 16y ago
Sorry about that. It should work fine (but a bit slowly) now. I had to stop all the other services on that machine to keep up with the traffic. My blog is in a virtual machine inside a low powered HTPC and this link is #1 here on HN and top10 in reddit frontpage so I'm getting a lot of hits.
- dasil003 16y ago
  Nope, down again. Varnish that bad boy!
jarin 16y ago
Server errors also distract from ads.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Unless your server-error page has ads on it. Hmm...

Groxx 16y ago

Nah, I uninstall crashy apps. And I, for one, never plan on buying anything they produce: how can you not notice 10 days of your application failing to work, and only notice because you checked ad revenue? Sorta implies where their focus is, neh? edit: Maybe this is part of the reason. Ratings from the iStore for the application in question: *****: 0 **** : 0 *** : 1 ** : 5 * : 9 Several other applications have similarly-weighted ratings, reports of crashing, etc, though a couple are higher. Color me disinterested.

pyre 16y ago
> how can you not notice 10 days of your application failing > to work, and only notice because you checked ad revenue Sounds like the cronjob is broken if he wasn't being spammed due to import errors...
albertogh 16y ago
App developer here. Is an application which turns in a small profit, so I don't look too much at it. On the other hand, Postfix wasn't running on that machine (I had been doing some testing three weeks ago and forgot to enable it again), so the emails generated by the cronjobs didn't get forwarded to my main email account.
- Groxx 16y ago
  I can see that, truly. And I do find the results interesting, though not really unexpected, if only because of the sheer number of people who clicked the ad(s). May I recommend something to mitigate this sort of thing in the future? Set up a script to launch an emulator for each of your apps which rely on others' services, unit test their core functionality, and save a screenshot of the key screens. Run it when you feel like it, come back in a few minutes, and peek at the pictures / pass / fail. Though, that said, I have not used the iPhone emulator. Can it be easily (enough) scripted to do something like that? I would certainly hope so, but I've been disappointed in development tools before.
albertogh 16y ago
Forgot to add something about those reviews. I guess you looked at the reviews for US App Store which (definitely, those aren't from Spain - there 800 review scores for this app in there), obviously, are going to be terrible for an app which doesn't show information about gas stations in the US.

jacquesm 16y ago

This is why there are many websites that split their 20 paragraph articles over 10 pages, the lower the actual content on a page the bigger the chance of a click on an ad, and the bigger the total ad inventory. Conversely, if your content is too compelling nobody will ever click on an ad.

acangiano 16y ago
> This is why there are many websites that split their 20 paragraph articles over 10 pages For this reason and because some of them are paid on a CPM basis, so the more pageviews the merrier.
hoop 16y ago
I always assumed this was for usability purposes. In particular, the whole "most users won't scroll down to see 'below the fold'" rule.
- tjpick 16y ago
  Users do scroll. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html From the article: Scrolling beats paging because it's easier for users to simply keep going down the page than it is to decide whether or not to click through for the next page
  - hoop 16y ago
    I haven't seen this before, thanks!
- code_duck 16y ago
  I find 'all on one page' far more usable than having to click 'next' and wait for a whole new page to load. Many comments I see generally indicate that this feeling is common.
Groxx 16y ago
Which is when I like to see referral links for Amazon / etc. I'll happily buy something I was already going to buy, and get them some money as well. I'd be willing to bet that the amount of use of those is directly proportional to how compelling / quality the content is. edit: though I have no clue how successful they are / have been. Anyone know what a relatively-popular blog makes from them?

owyn 16y ago

A former employer (and this is one of the many reasons I don't work there any more) was well aware of this and took advantage of it all the time. Just to give one example, their 404 error was a page of ads...

patio11 16y ago

Demand Media (and other ad-focused sites, but most remarkably their operation) understand this deep in their bones, which is why their content is to writing what chicken McNuggets are to chicken.

RBr 16y ago
I had a number of conversations about this exact sentiment when I was writing for Mahalo. I came to understand that there is a balance between writing enough information that users found an article helpful but not so much information that they would not want to click on ads or related pages. The problem of course is that when one is encouraged to write almost completely with profit and clicks in mind that eventually, their body of work becomes devalued by the audience.
vaksel 16y ago
yeah those guys are scum Search for "recover notepad files" and the first Google result is "How to Recover an Unsaved Notepad File | eHow.com " and then the whole article is about how you can't recover the file...with 4 adsense links at the end with most having click worthy titles like "recover deleted files" so Google users get screwed, Google advertisers get screwed, and eHow and Google both make a few extra bucks. I'd bet that all these content farms would have been long banned by Google, if they weren't using adsense.
- patio11 16y ago
  To be fair, I'm very happy with the performance of my ads on their pages. (For better or worse, they rank well for e.g. "How to make a bingo card" and my ads on that page have 400% ROI.) I don't think users get anything by seeing their site before my landing page, though (aside from "frustrated").
  - vaksel 16y ago
    well you already outrank them, so maybe you are paying them to get the customers you already got. how much are you spending per click there?

protomyth 16y ago

It could also be that the user thought, since there was no content but the ad, that the app had switched to one of those "click the ad before seeing the story" type things and clicked the only thing available to get the working data. Also, what kind of programmer doesn't have checks in data acquisition code to make sure it is valid and immediately alert someone when it is not?!?

justinchen 16y ago

This concept works great for custom 500 and 404 pages. Put an Adsense for Search box and make money when you're not able to serve something else.

code_duck 16y ago

That's the click through ratio, but what about the click counts?

Tichy 16y ago

Isn't that just the same as all the spammy grabbed domains? Get a good domain name, put ads on it. I've heard some people make good money with such sites.

lhnz 16y ago

Those people will leave in anger. Why would they ever use his service again?

lwhi 16y ago

I think this phenomenon is mainly about UX and IxD. If there's only one route presented to the user .. many of the users are likely to choose the single route presented to them. Perhaps this is a trite point, but I'd argue that it's a good example of how presentation of advertising should be included as a key part of any UX and IxD strategy.

chr15 16y ago

This reminds of a problem that many publishers have with Facebook's ad platform. Users are too engaged with the content to click on the ads.